separating the light from the darkness

From Plate 21 of William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It’s never easy to start work in the mornings. For anyone, not just writers. But with most occupations, somebody is usually there, watching you, expecting you to keep to a schedule, to be seen to be actively doing something. Writing is a solitary occupation - unless you’re a script writer and have to suffer the indignity of working in a team where your ideas are picked over by a roomful of strangers and the creative impulse is constantly opened up to scrutiny. As a novelist, you work alone on a piece of fiction and the only motivation is either an ongoing fascination with the characters or a simple need to keep up the mortgage payments. Even then, it’s still a chore to drag yourself to the keyboard each day and start laying down words. One after the other, words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters, like proverbial pennies making up pounds.

The odd thing is, rather like forcing yourself to go jogging or do an aerobics class, you may loathe starting to write, yet still walk away after one or two thousand words glowing with satisfaction. Perhaps the discipline of writing, like physical exercise, releases endorphins that keep writers coming back for more punishment, day after day. Some writers become addicted to the process. Penny Birch writes her novels in the space of a few weeks - or less! - at a white-hot pace. Anthony Trollope wrote some forty-seven novels, at the rate of about 17 per year, as well as vast quantities of other fiction and prose. Personally, I’m more of a plodder than a flier. But I do try to write something every single day, however little that may be, to keep the characters humming in my head.

Of course, writing erotica brings other, more interesting complications. Like getting turned on while you’re writing. Though I used to get turned on by my writing before I began writing erotica - I’m not sure whether that’s just an individual response or common to all writers - so perhaps getting turned on is nothing to do with content, or language, or even the mind leaping ahead to what the reader may feel when he/she reads the published book, but something to do with the act of writing itself. Was God turned on when he created the world?

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, darkness covered the face of the deep and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Genesis 1, 1 - 4

At least God was able to see at once that what he'd created was good. There is something deeply satisfying about reading through what you have written each day and seeing that it is ‘good’. Assuming that it is good, of course. Some days are better than others; some scenes write themselves, others struggle to be born or die soon afterwards and require strenuous editing or, sadly, the last rites. As a novelist - especially as a novelist writing, like me, under a pseudonym - you have little or no contact with the reader. You can only imagine the effect your work may have on the public. Even sales figures don’t necessarily reflect that. After all, they buy your book before they read it. Not after.

So when you start work in the mornings, you need some sort of routine to get you going. Like untying a rope on a barge and shoving off. But when you find yourself intent on cleaning the keyboard or suddenly desperate to check your email - as I was this morning! - you know you need to re-focus your mind on the story, on the characters you've created. They are what keep the story afloat, after all. You use the characters to create order out of the chaos in your mind, to separate the light from the darkness.